Spring Forward

 How was your Easter?  I had a lovely time with my family and also a totally chilled out couple of days with just me and Steve at home.  Ate too much chocolate and too many hot cross buns but hey ho!  It was Easter.  You're allowed.  Needless to say, straight back to Weight Watchers this week!

We've been having some interesting weather this past few days.  I love it.  It's so Spring-like.  April showers.  Sunshine and showers.  It's perfect for making things grow.  I'm enjoying this new Season and all that it brings including Mother's Day, Easter and pretty flowers in the garden.  Love, love the magnolia tree at my sister's.

 As well as enjoying all these wonderful seasonal changes, I've been experiencing new opportunities for my work.  Work.  Well, I call it work as it's how I earn my money, running my own business.  But my oh my I love what I do and as such, it's hard to call it "work".  Anyway, I digress.

My website is still being worked on.  I'm itching to get my online store back up and running.  In the meantime, apart from working on my new website, I'm designing and creating new digital scrapbooking products, paper crafting downloads etc.. for the new store and for Daisy Trail.  I was thrilled to be recently accepted as a designer, creating digikits for their online store.

I've had to go through a learning curve to get to grips with their Craft Artist software and I've been completely blown away by what you can do with it.  I'm a hard core Photoshop & Illustrator user so was a little worried about having to learn new software.  I needn't have worried.  It's extremely intuitive.  And they have a ton of fantastic video tutorials to help you learn everything from basics to more complex features such as cutting backgrounds from photos, layer effects and so on.  It's not just for digital scrapbooking.  They're templates for a greeting cards and printables.

Oh and it's a fraction of the cost of Photoshop!!  And if you want software specifically for digital scrapbooking and and computer paper crafting, I'd recommend it over Photoshop Elements too.  Wow!  Never thought I'd say that.  No, I'm not getting paid to big up Craft Artist ha!  I honestly think it's a great little piece of software.  The paper craft industry is moving forward.  I've seen so many huge changes in the past couple of years.  Digital technologies are being fully embraced.

I'm going to be doing a couple of craft projects for them in the next few weeks.  Can't say much more than that for now but once they're done and have a green light, I'll post them here.  I'm just thrilled to have the opportunity to be working with this UK craft company.

I love new seasons.  New beginnings.  New opportunities.  And always when you least expect it.  When you're not looking for it.  Those are the best.

Faux Fimo Flowers - a fun digi download just for you!

Freebie for you! A couple of papers and some faux fimo flowers

Please just leave a little comment if you download - thanks :){Click on image to see details}

Download here

So I came across Kirsty's cool videos over at YooTube and loved her fimo flowers demonstration. As well as inspiring me to try and create some faux ones in Photoshop, it took me back years to when I did art/craft with my kiddos especially my twinnies and we used to do alsorts with fimo. I forgot how wonderful that stuff is and how much I loved doing art and craft with my kids. I do miss those days so much and can't wait til my granddaughter is old enough to play!

Anyway, I also did a couple of matching papers and put it altogether as a little freebie for my readers here and my fellow UKScrappers. Hope you find some use for them. I'm creating some more as buttons and doing lots of colours and patterns as a big embellishment kit which will be available on my site and at ScrapGirls in the next couple of weeks.

Creating those flowers and papers got me off my backside for finally creating a freebie for my blog/store each month. I've been designing and creating digital scrapbook products for just over 2 yrs now but had to shut down my website/business due to some serious personal issues in my life and moving home. I'm excited to be back up and running and will be launching my new store in a few weeks time. So this is the first of many freebies to come.

More, More, More

Yep, more. More love, more art, more work, more rain, more movies, more happiness. My life seems to be full of an abundance of stuff.

Got more love in my heart than I know what to do with. For Steve, my children and my granddaughter. Lots of wonderful love in my life. I know I'm blessed.

As for work and art, I'm overwhelmed by all the ideas for new art I want to create as well as for new products both for 3d and my digital scrapbooking designs. Plus, Steve has uploaded a couple more of his images to our store that are now available as prints. My personal favourites are "Howdy Girl" and "An Unexpected Party".

Oh and yes, there's more rain. Rain, rain, rain. But that's to be expected. It's winter and I live in England! It actually doesn't bother me that much. As long as I don't have to go out. I can sit on the sofa, look out onto the canal and watch the ducks, swans and geese having a good ole time! Talking of the sofa, Steve and I don't have the tv tuned in so we only use it to watch dvds. And we usually watch a movie every night. We've also been watching Friends when we have our lunch. We joined the Tesco dvd rental club and it's really working out great for us. Much easier than going out to Blockbuster. Don't ya just love the internet?!